No place like home
Although Covid-19 has compromised our lust for foreign travel, we’re lucky to live in a country as rich and varied as Great Britain. Trevor Ward reveals the rewards of staying at home this year…
In 2018, maths teacher and endurance cyclist Michael Broadwith rode the length of Great Britain. He didn’t see much of the scenery because he rode non-stop through the night and suffered a neck injury, which meant he had to prop up his head with his hand when riding uphill. He completed the 841 miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats in a record time of 43 hours, 25 minutes and 13 seconds. Had he been in less of a rush, he’d have been able to appreciate the splendour and variety of Britain’s topography.
When author and TV journalist Tim Marshall made the same journey – taking two weeks rather than two days – he revelled in the changes in scenery, climate, cuisine and dialect.
“Every day, wherever I was, I’d say, ‘Right, I’m knackered now, I’ve done 80 miles,’ pull over, find a pub or B&B, go out for a curry and then start all over again the next day,” he recalls.
“The toughest day was the first. I did 60 miles and it felt like riding over the Himalayas, while the coldest day, probably of my life, was Inverness, in July.
“But it was fantastic. The local accents would change every half day and I’d always eat the local food, whether Cheshire cheese or a Balti in West Bromwich. And being a huge football fan, I’d take time to go out of my way to visit grounds I’d never been to before, such as Gigg Lane in Bury, or Cowdenbeath, romantic places like that.”
Home comforts
The coronavirus pandemic has forced us to reconsider how we live our lives. Foreign holidays are off the table for many. ‘Staycation’ is one of the words of 2020.
Instead of heading to the Alps to ride some famous climbs from the Tour or Giro, we’ve been forced to dig out our long-neglected Ordnance Survey maps and see what’s available locally. And for many of us, it’s been a revelation.
The United Kingdom – let’s not forget some of the stunning landscapes in Northern Ireland, whether the rugged Antrim coast or the desolate Mourne Mountains – not only boasts a rich variety of scenery, it’s also steeped in a culture of cycling that, to the rest of the world, appears either quaintly endearing or wildly eccentric. Why would anyone want to race up and down a dual carriageway against the clock, for example? Or strip their bike down to the absolute minimum of cables, cogs and chainrings before racing up a 1:5 gradient? But more of this madness later.
The mountains of this country may not be very high, but they can be as lonely, rugged and windswept as the best the Alps or Pyrenees has to offer. There are areas of the Scottish Highlands, Yorkshire Moors and Peak District where it is possible to lose yourself at the top of a desolate pass beneath an endless sky and not see a single bar on your phone. “The empty horror of the moors” as Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes once described his native county.
This magazine once sent me to a remote glen in Scotland because the map for that area was the poorest selling in the Ordnance Survey range. I was only 20 miles from the nearest train station yet had close encounters with leaping salmon, golden eagles and galloping stags (see p20 for the full story).
In the same country but nearer to civilisation are the Ayrshire Alps, several hundred acres of rolling hills, valleys and moorland that offer testing climbs on narrow, empty roads. Local riders have labelled the area a ‘road cycling park’, complete with a website – - giving profiles of all the climbs and suggested itineraries. Depending which one you choose, you will be rewarded with views over sprawling forests, empty moors or distant islands.
When Michael Broadwith isn’t breaking records – a year after his End to End ride, he won silver at the World 24-hour time trial championships with a distance of 510 miles – he relishes the chance to travel from his home in Hertfordshire and ride his bike in Scotland.
“The far quieter roads, the sense of remoteness and the grandeur of the scenery are unrivalled,” he says. “The Scottish hills are longer, higher and more dramatic than anywhere else in the UK and the stunning views will push you on to do just one more ascent before you finish for the day.”
For Simon Warren, author of the 100 Greatest Cycling Climbs series of books, the north-east of England is the perfect getaway for anyone seeking adventure on a bike in pandemic-era Britain.
“The Lakes, the Dales and the North Yorkshire Moors would all be high on my list, but if I had to head out at this very minute I’d make a beeline for County Durham and the village of St John’s Chapel, a part of the country that has more nasty hills per capita than just about anywhere else,” he says.
“If you desire windswept summits, barren moorland and, most importantly, isolation and solitude, then this is the place. Up in the high Pennines, where the weather is reliably hostile all year round, and centred around the valleys of Teesdale and Weardale, is a network of narrow, deathly quiet roads just perfect for an escape.”
Another candidate for ‘most wild and remote route’ is to be found on the other side of the Pennines, the five-mile climb to Great Dun Fell, Britain’s highest paved road. The final, exposed stretch is closed to motorised traffic and offers spectacular views over Cumbria, Lancashire and beyond.
Continue heading south from the foot of Great Dun Fell and you will eventually cross the Trough of Bowland, another remote climb in an AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) that was a regular training haunt of Bradley Wiggins in the build-up to his all-conquering 2012 season. “I trained on these roads in winter,” he told me at the time. “This is where the Tour was won.”
Gentler are the rolling roads of the Ribble Valley, whose picturepostcard villages and quiet country lanes earned it the title of the UK’s Happiest Place in 2019. It also has something else vital to happiness on a bike – plenty of good cafes and pubs for refuelling stops, including the excellent Green Jersey cafe-cum-bike-shop in the popular market town of Clitheroe.
The importance of cafes in British cycling culture cannot be understated. Entering a favourite cafe mid-ride is one of cycling’s unheralded pleasures. As well as respite from the weather, gradients and effort, it offers camaraderie over the cake and coffee, a chance for conversation that isn’t punctuated with laboured breathing or shouts of, ‘I think it’s brightening up!’
Pull of gravity
There is another hallowed tradition of British cycling that is not quite as convivial, though.
“Although it’s going through a purple patch of popularity right now, the hill climb has long been the runt of the British racing scene,” says Simon Warren. “Crammed in at the end of the year when the legs are tired and the leaves are falling, they appeal to a special breed of rider, one that is slightly unhinged. They give up eating for a couple of months then each weekend try and hurt themselves as much as is physically possible, heading to crazily steep roads to push themselves so far into oxygen debt that they collapse over the line.
The mountains of this country may not be high, but they can be as lonely and windswept as the best the Alps has to offer